Blog Post - News, Views and Tips

Motivation in the early stages of weight loss, or starting a new healthy fitness lifestyle, can be easy. The weight comes off fast and your energy levels are boosted. However it starts to get challenging when your body hits a plateau, gets used to less food & more exercise, learns to adapt and brings your new healthy regime to a screeching halt!

You need to be armed with a few ideas and solutions to stay on track –

1. You need to have a strong desire to lose weight and get in shape. Without the right attitude you are wasting your time.

2. Find a motive, a reason for changing. This can be having a 3 month goal to get in shape for a summer holiday, or just wanting to improve your self esteem.

3. Reward yourself on achievement, or better still get someone else to put up the reward.

4. Don’t try to change everything all at once, it is far easier to change a couple of things a week. A good idea that works with my clients is to write just two food changes down on a piece of paper the first week, and then two more the next week, and so on and so on. Thus cutting out bad habits and replacing them with good ones as you go. Pin this sheet up somewhere you can see it, and add to it until you have turned your whole lifestyle around.

5. Try aiming to get to about an 80% balance of healthy food, and allow a small 100 kcal food treat each day. This will help you look forward to something you enjoy at the end of the day, and helps keep you from getting bored with your diet.

6. Don’t be hard on yourself. If you have had a bad food day, put that aside the next day, get focused and try again.

7. Boredom accounts for too many lost causes, so take up a new hobby or interest to take your mind off food. It could even be a new fitness class.

8. Don’t keep weighing yourself! If your new fitness lifestyle includes weight bearing (weight training) exercises, the scales are likely to go up as you gain healthy muscle before they come down due to fat loss.

9. Make sure you change up the exercise and/or intensity every few weeks making it harder, just to keep your body guessing, break the plateau and keep that boredom away.

10. Lastly just do the best you can. Remember being healthy is a lifestyle choice and will take some time to get to where you want to be.